There are many retail outlets which sell single cans of products, such as beverages, which the customer wishes to purchase chilled for immediate consumption. Orderly storage of such canned products in a commercial cooler is difficult because of the many varieties of products that must be readily available to customers, and also because of the need for replenishing supplies of each product as they are purchased. The replenishment problem has been greatly simplified by making commercial coolers that are loaded from the rear and emptied from the front; but this does not simplify the orderly display of products in the cooler.
A number of gravity feed dispensers have been developed which can be used in a commercial cooler; but most of them are multi-level structures which, while they may be shipped in knocked down form, do not consist of units which can be stacked to the extent permitted by the vertical space between racks in the cooler. Reference is here made to Mason U.S. Pat. No. 2,852,327 and Umstead U.S. Pat. No. 2,915,162. Reference is also made to a gravity feed beverage can dispenser illustrated at page 27 of the POPAI Eighteenth Annual Merchandising Awards 1977 Winners Directory, published by Point of Purchase Advertising Institute, 60 East 42nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10017.
A stackable knock-down display is disclosed in Wiese U.S. Pat. No. 3,704,792.
There are a number of factors that complicate the problem of designing a satisfactory gravity feed can dispenser for use in commercial coolers. A first consideration is to make the dispenser as compact as possible, consistent with making it easy to load and unload, and capable of handling the three different sizes of cans that are used for beverages, which represent the vast majority of all products displayed and sold from commercial coolers.
Another factor is that nearly all the racks used in commercial coolers consist of parallel wires that extend from front to rear of the cooler. This means that a can dispenser which is made with thin side walls to save cooler space cannot be supported stably upon the racks because the thin side walls fall between the wires. At the same time, transverse supports on the bottom of a dispenser are unsatisfactory if the dispenser is to be an upper unit of a stack, because the transverse supports project into the space which must be kept unobstructed for the travel of cans down the next lower dispenser in the stack.